


Hair of the Spider

by Fwee



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Blackouts, Drunkenness, Sexual Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:41:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22870417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fwee/pseuds/Fwee
Summary: Lisa convinces Taylor to try drinking for her birthday.  It gets out of hand.
Relationships: Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Brian Laborn | Grue
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64





	Hair of the Spider

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot was written as a gift to https://ieatedanimation.tumblr.com/ for her wonderful contributions to the Worm fandom. Check out the link for great art of Taylor, Lisa, and a bunch of other Wormy goodness. Credit to her for the initial idea.

“Taaayyyyylllloooooor.”

I had millions, maybe billions of bugs, but no matter how many hands I used, it seemed like I could never even put a dent in my work. Spiders spun webs, but they exhausted their supply and needed to rest and feed on the dwindling piles of bug food. Cockroaches and beetles pushed or used spidersilk tethers to pull the heavier things around. They assembled lunches for the kids in my care, pulled clothes from the washing machine to the dryer, and dragged some spare cleaning supplies back into cupboards.

“Taaaaaaayyyyyyyyylooooooooor!”

Outside my base, teams of nearly-invisible flies and gnats patrolled in a circular pattern, keeping an eye on the surroundings. The base was close enough to the newest construction that I also had a handful of bugs dedicated to marking the people who not just entered my range, but stayed in it. Foremen types, and those taking a break in the shade of nearby buildings. I’d participated in a few work crews, and I knew that you rarely stayed in one place for long. Even when work needed doing in one place, they tended to rotate the people without much experience around so nobody got too worn out. In the sewers-

“Taylor!” the shout right in my ear startled me out of my thoughts, and nearly made me drop the bottle of bleach downstairs.

“Lisa, fuck! What is it?” I turned and immediately reared back; her breath _reeked_ of alcohol.

“Ta-lor,” she said, clipping the word strangely, “doya know what today is?”

I had to put a hand on her chest and push her away to stop her from leaning into my personal space. She… didn’t look as bad as I would have thought for how drunk she sounded. Her hair was a little messy, but the bags under her eyes weren’t any worse than usual, and… well, maybe all of us kind of looked like shit these days.

“I don’t know, Lisa. We have a shipment of the basic foodstuffs coming in later today… the team meeting isn’t until next week… it’s Wednesday?”

“Okay, firs’ off, it’s Thursday. Dummy.” I’m pretty sure Lisa was trying to point an accusatory finger, but it looked more like she was wagging it at a point somewhere to my right. “But it’s also your birfday, silly.”

“Oh.”

With everything that had been happening- the Nine, pressure from Coil, getting the city back on its feet- I hadn’t had the time to stop and check a calendar. It almost felt absurd to at this point, like the city was disconnected from the rest of the world, not just by the ruined roads, but with the flow of time too. In a way, it was; we tended to run on our own time, as sunlight and weather allowed.

“I have too much to do to have a celebration. I still need to map out the sewer exit-“

“That. Is the saddest _goddamn_ thing. I have ever heard, Tay.” Lisa was starting to wear my arm out, so I moved out of the way, slowly deceasing the pressure I was using to hold her up. She sank like a dead weight, not doing anything to support herself. We ended up with her draped over one arm of my good chair and me sitting on the other arm. The chair creaked, but it held.

“Why are you drinking? Why are you even _here_?” I let out a breath. “I don’t mean that I don’t want you here, but you have your own base, with your own work to do, right?”

“It can wait.”

“Can it? Lisa-“

“Here.”

Without looking, Lisa’s arm came up above the lip of the couch, clutching a white glass bottle. I could see some liquid sloshing around inside, maybe half of it was still there. She shoved the bottle forward, nailing me in the collarbone with the bottom of it before I grabbed it from her. The now-empty hand flopped forward. “Drink,” Lisa commanded. I looked down at the bottle; it was weirdly heavy.

“I’m not twenty-one.”

“You’re a crim’nal. You robbed a bank.”

“It’s irresponsible.”

“It’s irresponsible to burn out and leave the rest of us twisting in the wind.”

I glanced over; Lisa was looking up at me, though the mess of hair in front of her face ruined the effect of her otherwise stern look.

“Lis’n, Taylor. You gotta just take a day now and then, you know? Things are fine right now, so before they get all hectic and there’s stuff you _absolutely cannot put off_ , jus’… take a day. Relax a bit, don’t be so tense that I could tenderize meat on your back muscles.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I needed to put this away somewhere that the kids… or Lisa… couldn’t get to it. I got off the chair and started heading for the stairs.

“Doesn’t mean it’s less true. Look, Taylor-“ She stopped, and I turned to look. She was staring me dead in the eyes, surprisingly clearly. “Just one sip, ‘mkay? Just a lil. Then I’ll stop _bugging_ you.”

Ignoring the pun, I held up the bottle. “Just one, and then I’m putting this away and getting you in bed to sleep this off.”

No sense in dragging it out. I brought the bottle up to my lips and tilted it back until a small splash of the stuff inside slipped past my lips. I didn’t want to taste it more than I had to, so I swallowed right away. It tingled in my throat as it went down.

“Okay, I had the-“

\- - -

Cold, it was cold. I pulled closer to the pillow, resting the cold side of my face on it. It was stiff, but warm. I had my arms wrapped around it already, but I hooked a leg up as well- the blanket was really thin, I could barely feel it, and I needed all the warmth I could get.

The pillow was kind of rough, too. I wrinkled my nose against a couple of stray hairs, but I didn’t want to move too much. I felt kind of gross all over, like I’d gone to bed in sweaty clothes. Experimentally, I stretched my shoulder up a little and felt a clinging resistance around my ribs. Ugh.

I didn’t want to get up, but it was cold, even with the warm pillow, and even through my screwed-shut eyelids I could tell it was getting light.

Reaching out for my bugs, I-

My bugs.

Where were my bugs ‽

I opened my eyes, and immediately regretted it. In my time as a cape, I’d been shot at, set on fire, crushed, stabbed, and been hurt by any one of a dozen weird parahuman abilites, but the whiteout-pain that erupted behind my eyes eclipsed them all. A low whine escaped my throat- which I suddenly realized was parched and scratchy as hell- as I curled up in an even tighter ball around the… pillow…

There was no way I was opening my eyes again, so I carefully felt around with my hands. Round, warm, leg. Leg?

With trembling fingers, I traced the- definitely non-human- leg down to the hoof at the end. Okay, not one of Rachel’s dogs, then. Fuck. Not that I wanted to be sharing a bed with a dog, but at least that would have made some kind of sense.

What happened last night?

Tentative, light exploration up and down my… sleeping companion… revealed that it was a pig. Or a hornless, fat, mostly-shaved goat. I gently extricated myself from it- it was breathing, but thankfully it was asleep, and I wanted it to stay that way- though I cursed the cold that immediately rushed in.

Now that I was slightly more lucid, I realized that I was feeling a lot more cold than I probably should, even with damp clothes. Specifically in two very important places. I almost didn’t want to find out, but I ran my hands experimentally over my chest and lap. 

Where were my clothes? Why was I covered in _pizza slices_ ‽

With my legs and- god, I almost wish I hadn’t realized- exposed rear end moving around on the ground, I could tell that I was not, in fact, in my bed. Or any bed.

Despite the urgency of the situation, it took me way too long and too many tries to keep my eyes open long enough to look around between peeling pizza slices off my body. Everything ached and I was sore in muscles that I hadn’t even known that I’d had before, but the splitting headache was the worst, especially since it felt like it got twice as bad every time I moved my head an inch or fucking blinked.

I fought down panic and a rising tide of vomit and forced myself to take in objects, begin establishing facts. Okay, I was definitely naked. Not a stitch of clothing. Pizza? Confirmed, ham and pineapple. Pig? Confirmed, and I also discovered that the words “Greace Lightning” had been scrawled on its side in some kind of bright red paint.

We were on… a platform made of wooden planks. About twelve by twelve feet, with half-foot-high wooden railings on the perimeter. We seemed pretty high up, and in every direction I looked- except for wherever the sun was, because that was still too painful- there was a stretch of water, and then the reduced skyline of Brockton Bay beyond.

…was I in the crater lake that Leviathan had made? I didn’t remember there being a structure like this out here, the closest thing was a few half-collapsed buildings peeking up above the waterline.

The pig had woken up at some point and was eating one of the slices of pizza that I’d discarded. I let him. Him? I ducked my head and checked, briefly. Her.

Okay, so I was on a wooden platform in the middle of a lake with a pig. And I was naked. And had no idea how I’d gotten here. And there weren’t any bugs in my range.

Wait, that was… fuck, it was hard to think. That wasn’t normal. My range extended down as well as to the sides, I could usually feel tons of earthworms and other burrowing bugs that I never used. I wasn’t that high up, was I?

Problem solving, have to focus. Get down from here, get to shore, get clothes, fill in the gaps in my memory. That made sense, right?

It took a painfully and humiliatingly long time to pick my way down the criss-crossing wooden planks that, yes, were built on top of one of those half-sunken rooftops. Maybe even the one the heroes and villains had held the Slaughterhouse Nine truce meeting on, I wasn’t sure. My bare feet touched the rough gravel of the roof, and I let out a sigh of relief.

_Orrnkkk._

I looked up, easily twenty feet above me, at the off-white snout poking over the railing. A fleck of cheese fell down and landed somewhere in my hair.

“Go eat some fucking pizza or something!” I rasped up at it.

_Rrrrink!_

“Fuck you, I’m leaving!”

_Oorrrrnnnggg._

About ten times longer than it’d taken me solo, I was back down on the roof, pig standing beside me.

“After all the shit you just put me through,” I panted, “you’re going to be my fucking raft.” My vision was still somewhat blurry, closed-in, but I could make out where the shore in the distance was. I could paddle.

_Rrrngk._

With the surprisingly buoyant pig to keep me afloat, I was able to focus on kicking my legs, and we made it to the other side in good time. I was definitely going to have to see a doctor right after I figured out what was going on, though; skinny dipping in city water couldn’t be healthy.

Not only had we reached shore, I’d also reached my bugs. They were packed close together in several large containers scattered around the area. Thousands of bugs had already died from being packed together so closely, but the ones who were still alive gave me a very odd picture of their surroundings. I couldn’t use my bugs to search for clothes with them locked up like this, so freeing some of them would be my first priority. At the very least, I could cover myself with a small swarm. With “Greace Lightning” by my side, I jogged to the nearest location, what looked to be a half-collapsed suburban home. Luckily, nobody really lived around here anymore; the constant reminder of the Endbringer who’d caused all this destruction probably didn’t make for very appealing real estate.

The house had been boarded up, but the boards were lying, smashed, just inside the doorway. I didn’t have my bugs to scout ahead- the only ones in my range were still all locked up- but I made sure to be cautious as I made my way through the house and up the stairs. It seemed like I didn’t need to, though. Despite the break-in, and the bug-container set up, the house seemed just plain abandoned.

I pushed through a half-broken door to what might have been a bedroom but was now almost entirely taken up by a floor-to-ceiling glass cylinder _packed_ with bugs.

After trying my hand (ow), a chair leg, and a hammer (double ow), I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to break through the glass. Okay, no bugs, but I was in a house. Step 3. Or was it 4? Find clothes. There were only a few rooms in the house that weren’t rubble, but I was able to find a tipped set of drawers and get them on one side so I could open it and check inside.

Who even _owns_ a bra that doesn’t cover anything?

I was on the verge of giving up and accepting my new life as a nudist when my eye caught on something I’d missed on my first scan over the bug room. I’d missed it because it wasn’t a normal article of clothing- it was a costume. A Clockblocker costume. With the moving clocks and everything.

This was Clockblocker’s costume.

As dangerous as it could be going around in a superhero’s actual costume, going around in my birthday suit would be even more dangerous, so I pulled it on. Despite my… androgynous figure, the suit was still a poor fit, stretching in some places and pooling awkwardly in others. As I was straightening out the feet, I noticed Clockblocker’s helmet lying under a pile of insulation foam. It would protect my identity, but it would also make it even easier to get mistaken for the real Clockblocker. Was it worth it? Would my hair even fit in it?

I grabbed the helmet, and- oh god, there was a hole in it. Near the middle, about two inches wide, there was a neat hold boring all the way through to the inside. I half-dropped, half-threw the helmet away.

Had I…

Did we…

Was Clockblocker dead? I hadn’t seen any blood, but something that went through a helmet like nothing… I suddenly felt much worse about wearing his costume. Not so bad that’d I’d take it off, but still pretty bad.

I still needed to find out what was going on, how I’d ended up in the crater lake. I’d head for my territory, get a phone, call Lisa.

Greace was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, and oinked happily when I reappeared and started down. My head was still pounding with every step, and my side felt like I’d been run over by a steamroller, but I had clothes, I had something like a friend, and I had a direction to go in. I could do this.

The city seemed quiet, but maybe it was just because I was away from the bulk of the rebuilt parts of the city and the ongoing construction. After the massive storm that Leviathan brought, most of the city became eerily quiet, like a ghost town. Clockblocker’s shoes were the wrong size and shape, but they still did a good job keeping the worst of the wet and litter-heavy streets from getting to me, so I couldn’t really complain.

“Hey, there’s the pig! Wesson, circle around!”

I snapped my head back, where a man five or so blocks behind me was pointing and shouting.

Shit.

“Run!” I said to Greace, already putting my own words into action.

I was in Clockblocker’s costume, and the guy had been pretty far when I’d turned around, so maybe I could get out of this without exposing my identity. But I would have to stay away from the pursuers to keep things that way. Fuck, running hurt in twelve different ways right now.

Greace and I were pounding down the sidewalk, moving in a relatively straight line but still gaining some distance, when an arm shot out of an alleyway and snagged me by the scruff at the front of the costume, pulling me in.

I shot out an arm, trying to blindly strike my attacker, but then my eyes finally settled on who exactly was holding me.

“Lisa?” I hissed. “What the fuck is going on?” She was covered in dust and grit, her hair matted down around her face and shoulders, and her clothes- the same ones she’d been wearing last night- were tattered. A quiet oink behind me let me know that Greace had followed us into this temporary hiding place.

“We-“ she winced, and her hand left my stolen suit to press against her forehead, “we got drunk. Um. Fuck, I have a power headache _and_ the worst hangover headache I’ve ever even heard of. I could have stayed in bed, but I remembered enough to know that you were… probably not in the best place, so I came to find you. You’re welcome for that, by the way.”

“What- you-“ I couldn’t get out the hundred questions I had, so I started with the most important. “What happened last night?”

Lisa sighed, long and deep. “Like I said, we got drunk. Blackout drunk. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I’m pretty sure this-“ she held up something in her other hand, a small golden sphere with a lens poking out- Uber and Leet’s snitch-camera? “-will tell us. I just need to get to a computer so I can download its data.”

I was about to respond, but Lisa’s finger pressed against my lips- leading a dirty smudge- and the words died in my throat.

Whoever it was chasing Greace, they ran right past the alleyway without looking in. I’m pretty sure all of us, pig included, held our breaths until his heavy footsteps faded away.

“We should go,” Lisa said.

“Yeah.”

_Rrriiiink!_

We half-walked, half-jogged (one third trotted) through the ruined alleys and backstreets of downtown Brockton Bay. _Still_ no bugs. Lisa was leading the way, but I still got a good sense of what direction we were moving in.

“We’re going to Alec’s base?”

Lisa spoke without turning around, “it’s the closest, and I know he’s got a computer. Why, do you have some kind of problem with it?” She sounded more tired than angry, but there was definitely some anger there.

I thought about her question. I did feel reluctant, I just wasn’t sure why. It might just be because I wanted to go back to my own base, to relative safety, but I could probably get a change of clothes at Alec’s base too. Was it something about what happened last night? It was all still just blackness, a dark void between getting pestered by Lisa and then waking up on top of that wooden tower.

“Did they get involved in… whatever happened last night? We clearly didn’t just stick around my lair.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

We were quiet until we arrived, a relatively unassuming building on an abandoned street. The door was locked, but Lisa revealed a hidden keypad in a panel behind one of the pillars next to the door and punched in a number. Why didn’t _I_ know about that? Did I have a secret keypad in _my_ base that I didn’t know about?

Questions for later. The inside of Alec’s base was… somehow worse than the outside. Stains on the walls and floor, garbage everywhere, broken furniture, there was a garden hose hanging from one of the light fixtures.

“Uuuuuugggggh,” said a tarp lying over a pile of trash.

“Aisha, get up!” Lisa said, causing all of us to flinch at the sudden loud noise, even her. I closed the door behind us, and the click of the lock seemed to stir Aisha into action, since when I turned around, she had pushed up and was disentangling herself from the tarp.

“Do you know what happened last night?” I called over.

Aisha stopped, blinked. Looked left, right, even up at the ceiling.

“A rad party?” she guessed.

I just sighed, but Lisa pushed forward. “Do you know where Alec is? I need to use some of his stuff.”

“Bitch, do I look like I know my head from my ass right now?”

I looked around. “Wait, Rachel’s here too?”

“Oh.” Aisha said. “Uh, different kind of bitch.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Hey, don’t you wear glasses?”

I blinked. Then I reached up a hand to my face, then up to my hair, where I sometimes kept them. I blinked again.

“I… can see just fine. I don’t _feel_ like I’m wearing contacts.”

“Did you go get laser eye surgery while you were blackout drunk? Because that’s hilarious.”

At some point, Lisa had left into one of the side rooms, but she drew mine and Aisha’s attention when she came back with a laptop, trailing a cord behind her. She set it and the snitch down on a table- one of the only remaining bits of furniture- and plugged them both up together.

“It’s tinker-made, right?” I asked, walking closer. “Are you sure you can get through the security?”

Lisa’s fingers pounded the keys, and her pointer finger occasionally moved down to swipe at the trackpad. “It’s just the flying tech that’s special. The camera’s basic electronics store fare. Not even encrypted, it’s all designed for ease of use.”

She pulled up a video-player on the laptop and started opening the segmented video files with it. Most of them were just black, or still shots of a wall, even when she fast-forwarded all the way through.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered under her breath. I found myself leaning in, and I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Aisha was doing so too, on the other side.

She kept going through files, until we’d seen over twenty with nothing useful. And then things got weird.

“Uh,” Aisha said, pointing at a newly-downloaded video file with a name that was flickering between two different strings of gibberish, “is that supposed to happen?”

_Snngrnk._

“Huh.” Lisa tried opening it, and the video player disappeared.

“Did it crash?” I asked. Lisa clicked the icon for the player, rapid-fire, and eventually it opened back up.

“Corrupted somehow. Almost certain it’s a power fucking with the files. Let’s just avoid those.” She tried another, normal-looking file.

It was a close shot of… some room that I had never seen before. White tile, bad lighting. Greace was lying on her side, patiently waiting while a guy with red hair- I couldn’t see much else from this angle- and I painted those same shaky letters that now adorned her flank. It was disturbing, seeing myself doing something I had no memory of, but there I was, facing away from the camera, kneeling on the ground and applying paint with rhythmic strokes.

“You guys drew on a pig? Wait-“ I looked down- Greace was nudging Aisha’s leg with her snout. “Oh my god, you guys HAVE a pig?” She shot down to her knees and was patting its face and making kissy sounds and baby noises, so I left those two to it and turned back to the laptop. Lisa was playing a new video.

“Okay, okay” the Lisa in the video said, though with how she was slurring her words, it came out more like “oh-gay”. “You know what to do, righ’?” The me in the video nodded, head bouncing way too high and low, and then the camera panned up towards a white speckled ceiling.

“What?” I wasn’t sure what I was watching; past-us had been sitting on some kind of bench, but we weren’t outside. A cafeteria? Had we gone to one of the schools that was still standing after all the destruction that had happened to the city?

Lisa tapped the “sound up” button, whispering “I don’t want to know, but I _have to know_.”

All I could hear was some kind of weird slurping sound, and then the camera started wobbling, destabilizing more and more, and I caught a glimpse of Lisa and I, our faces _very_ close. I was about to tell Lisa to go back, but she was way ahead of me, rewinding and then going forward a frame at a time until the culprit was in plain sight.

That was definitely us, and we were definitely right next to each other, our faces almost touching. But from the high angle and with the low resolution, I couldn’t make out any details. Apparently Lisa couldn’t either, since she started the video back up.

The snitch’s wild oscillations continued for a couple moments before stabilizing and panning back down. The front of my shirt was covered in something red and pale off-white, and Lisa was wiping her mouth.

“Did we… did you?”

“Throw up on you, yeah. Apparently.”

“I’m not _that_ bad at it, am I?”

The video ended, and Lisa didn’t pull up the next. After a moment, I turned and found her giving me an inscrutable look. I raised my eyebrow, but she just kept staring. Eventually she sighed and said, “don’t take it personally, we were both drunk.”

“Right. Try one of the later ones, maybe?”

The video files were named after a timestamp- the ones that weren’t corrupted, anyway- and Lisa opened one labeled about an hour later than the ones we’d been watching.

“What’s this I hear about-“ Aisha popped up just in time to watch with Lisa and I as the video zoomed in on a pile of rubble, freshly fallen if the dust cloud that was still expanding around it was any indication. The view moved around to the side, and through the dust we could see a figure trapped beneath an I-beam. It was sunken into the ground immediately to her right, but the body of the thing was pressing against her, leaving what must have been a _dent_ in her stomach-

“Is that Lisa?” Aisha’s voice had lost a lot of her bounciness, but she still let out a nervous chuckle.

“My power is saying… yes. And with a wound like that, I should be dead.” I noticed her hand resting on her belly, where the wound should be, and I put my arm over her shoulder, holding her close.

“We must have gotten you to a healing cape or something.”

“No,” her voice was shaky. “My body would have been cold before you called someone in, let alone got me out of the city. I… should be dead. But I feel fine. Well, I feel like shit, but not like my spine got pulverized or anything.”

The version of me in the video rushed to what, if I believed Lisa, was her dead body, before the clip ended. Lisa- the one in the present- immediately started up another one, timestamped about an hour and a half later.

“Yeah, it’s, uh…” That was Alec’s voice coming out of the speakers, though the camera was pointing at a wall again. At least it was confirmation that we’d been here at some point. Maybe my actual clothes were here. “It’s nori-something. Norimara. Noritimari. Toryama. Notamiri? Anyway-“

“Any idea what he’s talking about?” I whispered to Lisa.

“No goddamn clue,” she whispered back.

“Jus’ call it a weird sushi kink, you weirdo.”

That was Lisa’s voice. Less than two hours after she’d been almost-killed, she was happily chatting away. What the fuck?

“I don’t like seafood,” oh god, that was me. “what if I-“

“ _You_ don’t eat it, dummy,” video-Aisha interrupted, clearly drunk. “And it’s all about the experience, anyway. It’s like strip poker, but it’s strip eating.”

And then the video ended, leaving all of us about a hundred times more confused than before.

“Aisha, do you remember…?” I asked.

“No clue.”

Lisa was already selecting a new video file. It was two more hours-

The file name flickered into gibberish, but Lisa had already opened it.

The computer exploded.

Well, it was more like it fried. The screen cracked and electricity arced over the keyboard. There was a popping sound from Leet’s drone, too, which didn’t seem good.

“Fuck, no, fuck!” Lisa pounded on the computer, and then grabbed the drone, looking it over before tossing it back onto the table with a dull thunk.

“They’re both completely fried. Whatever power corrupted it _really_ doesn’t like people trying to operate it.”

“Well, do we have any other leads?” I asked. “Alec, maybe?”

“Right, Alec. He’s used to getting wasted off his ass, he might not have blacked out like the rest of us.” Lisa pounded her fist into her open palm. “Let’s start searching. He must have _some_ idea what happened.”

“I got nothing,” Alec said, after the _ten minutes_ it took us to turn his entire base over, calling his name. “You guys showed up with a ginger kid and a pig, offered a bottle of something that looked like vodka but smelled like a margarita. And then I woke up here.”

He was shirtless, but honestly the most distracting thing was the navy blue eye shadow smeared around his eyes.

“Well, who was the guy?”

“I didn’t get a name, but he was riding that massive fuck-off beetle of yours.”

“Atlas‽ Where- wait.” Like having a bracelet on so long you’d forgotten you even had anything there, I realized that there was one bug inside of my range. A unique bug. “He’s on the roof. Come on.”

Between Alec’s look, Lisa’s coating of dust, my own costume, Aisha’s normal- for her- outfit, and Greace just being a pig, we must have made for a very strange procession racing down the stairs and out to the front door. Atlas was unsteady- I almost suspected that he was drunk, too, for as little sense as that made.

We made it outside just as Atlas touched down, a _very_ pale redheaded boy clinging to his back.

“You!” Lisa shouted. The boy’s head snapped up, and his eyes widened.

“Uh, hi?” He held up his hands defensively. “Do you know why I was… uh…”

His gaze had wandered down to Greace, and I saw something like recognition in his eyes. I gave him a second once-over: narrow chin, short, cropped hair, a mole on his cheek… this was the guy from the video!

I pointed at Greace and asked him, “do you know what’s up with this pig?”

“Pig?” Alec asked quietly, “Oh. Huh.”

“He was-“

“She.” I corrected.

“She… needs to come back with me.”

_Rrink?_

“Where would you be taking her?” It was weird to be this defensive about a pig of all things, and one I’d only met this morning, but she was a clue to the massive hole in my memory. I wasn’t about to give her up.

He scratched the back of his head. “Look, I- you’re Skitter, right?”

I tensed up. How had he- oh, right, the giant Hercules beetle I’d brought down from the roof.

“Look, it’s cool, this is, like, a truce, I guess. I’m Clockblocker.”

I stared at him.

He stared at me.

“I… “ I finally said, “your helmet. I thought you were dead.”

“Wait,” his face changed, “what happened to my helmet? Where- _are you wearing my costume_?”

I put an arm across my chest defensively. “It was the only thing I could find. It was next to a giant glass cylinder full of bugs. Know anything about _that_?”

Even without Lisa’s power, I could see the calculation going on behind his eyes. Eventually, he relented and said, “we- the PRT, that is- made a few of those as an anti-Skitter measure, but… why was my costume with it?”

Lisa chimed in, “None of us can remember anything about last night. You said we’re under a truce, so help us out here; what’s the last thing you remember?”

“Um, I was on patrol… I think I met… you two-“ he pointed at me and Lisa, “-and you had this, uh, beetle-“

“Atlas,” I supplied.

“Right. You had it with you, so obviously I was concerned. But after that… I don’t really remember.”

“What about the pig?” Aisha asked. I glanced over- Aisha was holding Greace up, arms hooked under her belly, but Greace seemed content to be held, so I let it be.

“She belongs with the PRT. She was one of a few pigs who we found in an abandoned Tinker workshop that was unearthed when Leviathan attacked. We don’t know what effects they might have been exposed to. For all I know, she’s got a bomb in her belly.”

Aisha nearly dropped Greace, but thankfully Lisa was quick enough to help, and together they lowered her to the ground unharmed.

“So yeah. She needs to come with me, so I can get her back in lockup.”

“We need more than that.” The words surprised me, even though they were coming out of my own mouth. “If this is a truce, then make it a trade. Information for information. We’ll take her back to the PRT, but you need to get us inside so we can search for more clues.”

Clockblocker scrubbed his face. “Why does that sound so familiar? Okay, fine. Let’s just-“

He was interrupted by the hard crack of gunfire, and all of us ducked to the ground as another shot went off, then another.

“There!” Alec pointed, and down the street, the man he was pointing at spasmed his gun in the air and kicked his leg out, falling over. He was dressed like one of Coil’s mercenaries. Shit.

“We need to go!” I sent Atlas wobbling over to hold him down, and when two more armed men came out of the alleyway nearby, I had him tackle them down instead. “Go!”

All of us- me, Lisa, Aisha, Alec, Clockblocker, and Greace- we all took off in a group, making for the closest cover on the other side of the street. The PRT building was south of here, and not too far, all things considered.

Sporadic gunfire chased us for a few blocks, but even after we seemed to be in the clear, by unspoken agreement we kept up the rapid pace. If it was just them trying to lull us into a false sense of security, it wouldn’t work.

Why had Coil sent his men after us? Did he think we were betraying him to the heroes when he saw us talking with Clockblocker? The men had already been out and armed when they saw us though, so they must have been sent before that.

What the fuck _happened_ last night?

The cluster of buildings opened up to our right, and I scanned the area, looking for more mercenaries. There was a humanoid shape standing out in the open, but it wasn’t a person.

We didn’t slow down, not that much, but I was pretty sure by the time the husk of a former restaurant blocked our view, every member of the group was staring. It had been a statue, humanoid but obviously fashioned out of junk and detritus. Maybe six or seven feet tall, and obviously male, if the two-foot chunk of concrete hanging from its crotch was any indication. That… was absolutely a new addition to the city.

We were all panting, hands-on-knees exhausted when we finally arrived at the PRT building. Luckily, Clockblocker had the access to let us in the back, so we didn’t have to deal with all the people in the lobby. Unluckily, when he punched in the security code and swung the door open, Miss Militia was standing squarely in the doorway, arms crossed and stance wide.

“You have some explaining to do,” she said, her voice tight.

We all spoke at once: “I was just-“ “-helped us-“ “-my turtle is sick-“ “-into the parking-“ “ -too hard.”

Half of us turned back towards Aisha.

_Rrroink!_

“Turtle? Seriously?”

Clockblocker hurriedly explained, “we’ve all lost track of events from last night, we think it might be a Master effect or something, we just need to get some of our stuff and she-“ he hooked a thumb back at Greace, “-needs to get back into containment.”

_Rngk?_

Wait, a Master power? Clockblocker was obviously just covering for us, but was it possible that he’d accidentally stumbled on the truth? It would explain why everyone’s memory was so fucky, and why we’d done such strange things while ‘drunk.’ But did any cape in Brockton Bay have a power like that?

Miss Militia looked over all of us, and then sharply back at Clockblocker.

“Are these the Undersiders?”

Oh shit.

“Um.” Clockblocker said. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye- Lisa was keeping Aisha from pulling her arm out from behind her back. Fuck. “Officially? No. Unofficially… truce?”

She looked to me, and I shrugged. Lisa, Aisha, and Alec all had a similar reaction. Miss Militia sighed deeply, fluttering her mask with the force of her breath.

“You brought back the _dangerous tinkertech experiment_ -“ she paused to glare at Clockblocker for a moment, “so I suppose I can let a truce stand for now. If I catch you doing anything untoward, though, or if I catch you in any restricted areas, that stops. Understood?”

“Yeah.” “Yup.” “Yes.” “Sure thing, sugartits.”

We paused for a moment while Lisa slapped Alec upside the head, and then Miss Militia let us in.

“Do you have a shower in here or something?” Lisa muttered. I had to admit that I could go for one too, given… the whole swimming thing.

“There’s a shower that the troopers use, I think. Um, leave the pig here and I’ll lead the way I guess?”

Between Lisa and I, we had Alec and Aisha wrangled on the short walk down the hallway and through a couple of security doors that Clockblocker unlocked for us. And then, the wonderful smell of crisp water and the refreshing sight of smooth white tile. The showers didn’t have doors at the entrance, but there was a dividing wall hiding the inside of each from view. “Okay,” Clockblocker said. “Get cleaned up, I’ll be out here on watch.”

Alec went in the side labeled “men”, and Aisha, Lisa, and I went into the one labeled “women”. As I passed Clockblocker, I stopped and said, “I’ll, uh, if there’s other clothes in there or something, I’ll get this back to you. After.”

I didn’t catch his response if he even made one. I was too busy running on the wet tile, half-hoping to slip and crack my head open so I’d be free of this embarrassing situation.

The showers were an open-plan affair, with no dividing walls or curtains or anything between the shower heads. Aisha was still pulling off clothes and tossing them aside, and Lisa was standing, fully clothed, directly under the spray of water, just letting it run over her with her head tilted back.

Luckily, there were actually spare clothes here. In an open set of shelves, stacks of plain grey jumpsuits marked with the PRT shield were folded above some towels. I grabbed one and brought it to a shower head on the other side of the room.

It was even harder getting out of Clockblocker’s costume than it had to get into it, but once I had the warm pressure of water running down my body, it was worth it.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone, and I had some information to find, so I couldn’t take the three hours I wanted to just stand there and decompress. Dirt and sweat and general grime flowed off my arms and legs, and I bundled up my ratty nest of hair to get my back-

“Woah, Taylor, I didn’t know you had a tattoo! Wild.”

What.

_What‽_

“What do you mean I have a tattoo?” I half-demanded, half-shrieked. Lisa and Aisha both rushed over, and at Aisha’s prompting, I turned back around. I felt hands lift up my hair, and then a touch high on the back of my neck sent a shiver down my spine.

“This… You can’t have gotten this last night,” Lisa said.

“I’ve never had a tattoo before. I wouldn’t even know where to get one!”

“I know a guy,” Aisha said. “Probably still around too, might even have his gear. Ooooh, maybe we-“

“No,” Lisa interrupted. “I mean, that’s impossible. The skin would be raw still, tattoos don’t heal over this quickly. My power is saying she must have had it for years, but that don’t make any sense…”

I pulled away and turned to face them, one arm over my chest and the other down between my legs. “I. Do not have. A tattoo. Or… I didn’t, until last night. What even is it?”

“A butterfly.” Aisha said. She had a towel pinned to her front with one arm, but if she was bothered by any of this, she didn’t show it. “It’s actually really pretty. Shame you can’t see it most of the time.

“Okay, let’s…” Lisa pushed her hands down, as if she was shoving everything that had happened today into a box to lock away. “just get cleaned up, and then hopefully we can find something in the PRT’s surveillance equipment that puts that final… fucking puzzle piece into place that makes the whole picture obvious.” She was still covered in dust and dirt, though it was now more like a mud slurry.

“Yeah.” I said. “You’re right. Let’s hurry up.”

True to my word, I finished quickly and toweled off before donning the very plain and generic jumpsuit. A few minutes later, Lisa, Aisha, and Alec and I were all back in the hallways of the PRT building, in various states of dress and wetness- Lisa was in the same clothes she’d walked into the shower with, now soaked through, and Alec hadn’t put on a shirt, though he’d traded his pants for a set of grey sweatpants. Clockblocker had his costume back, but he’d elected to hold onto it instead of changing.

Clockblocker looked us over, but whatever he was looking for, he came away visibly disappointed. “Listen. I know you guys are villains-“

“-Alleged villains!” Aisha butted in.

Clockblocker powered through, “-but I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t get me in trouble, since if you guys cause a mess, it’s my ass on the line, and even if none of us can remember it, I guess we went through a lot together last night. That’s gotta count for something.”

“Weak. Sauce.” Alec drawled. I elbowed him in the side, but he continued, “what are you going to do to keep us in line, anyway? Call the cops on us?”

“Hmmph. Well, since you mention it,” Clockblocker reached into his pocket, before pulling out a smartphone. “… this isn’t my phone,” he said, staring at it dumbly.

“That’s mine!” Lisa almost seemed feral as she lunged forward and snapped it out of his hand. I honestly had to appreciate Clockblocker’s restraint; if I’d had his powers and Lisa had come at me like that, she probably would have ended up frozen.

Lisa held her phone, and pushed a button. And then pushed it again. And again. She gave it one last go of rapidly jamming down on the button before letting her arms go limp and sighing. “It’s dead.”

“There’s chargers all over the office part of the building,” Clockblocker volunteered. “And there aren’t any classified materials or tinkertech caches up there either, so it’s perfect!”

He escorted us over to the stairwell- apparently the elevator was broken- and we climbed up, Lisa and Clockblocker in the front and me in the back keeping Aisha and Alec from wandering off. After everything else that had happened today, this was particularly exhausting, and the mind-numbing repetition of taking one step at a time, broken only by turning on the landings, made the whole climb pass with a strange combination of speed and slowness.

Clockblocker turned his deep exhale into words, “Hoookay, we’re here. Uh…”

The rest of us followed after him, Alec and Aisha not bothering to hold the door open, forcing me to grab it before it closed and swing it back open.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but this floor still managed to fall short. Rows of desks filled the main space, with cubicles and doors that presumably led to conference or storage rooms lining the outside, and all of it was covered in stacks of paper, discarded coffee cups, and general mess. Despite the fact that it looked like a hundred people should be at work here, the entire floor was empty, save for three people in casual dress over in one corner, secluded by what looked like a pillow fort, but with the pillows replaced by blocky, heavy-looking equipment and the blankets replaced by thin strips of ticker tape. Clockblocker immediately started toward them, and I grabbed a protesting Aisha and Alec by the backs of their necks and marched them in the same direction.

“Gang,” Clockblocker said, gesturing, “these are the techies. Techies, gang.” The three ‘techies’ were a guy with a long, thin beard and his hair drawn up into a short ponytail, a heavyset girl with green-dyed hair, and a guy so fat that he looked like he was spilling out of his office chair. None of them turned to look at us; that suited me fine, the fewer people looking at my face, the better. They were all staring at a television- the dinky little kind that you saw small store owners use on slow days, or playing the news at airports.

Lisa was already digging through their stuff, and since she seemed to know what she was looking for, I walked around the little alcove of gear until I was inside the “pillow fort” and could look over the techies’ shoulders to see what they were watching.

A woman- she looked to be a reporter- was staring just to the side of the camera and was speaking into a bulky microphone. As she spoke, the camera panned to the side, to a bridge up behind her. It was a big bridge, with towering steel arches holding it up, but if it was some city landmark, I didn’t recognize it. The camera moved past her shoulder and zoomed in, toward the bridge.

The quiet words from the television reached me at the same time as the camera’s focus corrected and the image sharpened. 

“Scion was found two hours ago, and was initially believed to be holding up the bridge, though no structural weaknesses have been found by city engineers or the local heroes. In a completely unprecedented change, the first in a decade and a half, Scion appears to be taking a break. Speculation has run rampant about what this could mean, but nobody has concrete answers. In the-“

I tuned her out. Scion looked… tired. His normally perfect façade of a face was drawn and gaunt, and he had a cigarette hanging limply out of the corner of his mouth. He reminded me of seeing Protectorate heroes right after Leviathan- usually larger than life, untouchable paragons, but suddenly so very tired, so very human.

“Alpaca Cigarettes’ stock skyrocketed within minutes, apparently.” That was Ponytail, sitting to my left. “They don’t even know if that’s what he’s got, but it’s the one with the most brand recognition.”

The girl replied, “You just know it’s gonna get pinned on us as soon as they suss out that Brockton Bay was the last place he fucked around before… fucking off.”

“Bullshit,” Ponytail said. “It’s all bullshit. They’re planning a damn parade for some nobody girl while half the city’s still blacked out and world’s strongest hero had a midlife crisis here or some shit.”

“Parade?” I asked. “No, wait, what the hell is going on with Scion?”

The tv had cut back to a pair of primped-up personalities talking back and forth, too quiet to hear as anything more than background noise.

The girl shrugged. “Nobody knows. Last night he flew in, there were reports of golden light like his usual MO downtown, and then the next anyone heard of him, he was up there, looking like a fucking jumper or something.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little at that. “If he jumps off that bridge, I feel sorry for the water. So what-“

Fatty cut me off, “Lazy bastard should have helped us round up the goddamn pigs before he left. I spent two hours looking over the _one_ video cam we still have running, looking for any sign of lucky number three.”

“Number three?” I asked.

Ponytail snorted. “Some chucklefucks thought it’d be funny to let a bunch of pigs loose in the building here, labeled em too. They caught one, two, and four right away, but no news on number three yet.”

“Got it!” I turned to see Lisa holding up her phone triumphantly, three different cables jutting out of its ports and tangling with each other. She powered it on and tapped in the password.

“Aw,” Aisha said, “that’s no fun. If you’re hacking into a phone, you gotta do it right! Like this-“ she slid on a pair of sunglasses and her voice lowered to a low, gravely rumble, “I’m in.”

Ponytail spun in his chair and snapped the sunglasses off of Aisha’s face with a scowl. “Give me those.” He replaced them in the pocket of his shirt. Damnit Aisha.

“You need all that shit just to charge your phone?” asked Alec.

Tattletale’s fingers swiped through menus and apps as she spoke. “Not if I just wanted to charge it, but then all I would have is what’s _on_ the phone. With the surveillance technology so generously provided by our friends here-“

Ponytail tried to turn around again, but I held the back of his chair in place until he stopped trying.

“-I can not only look at texts and pictures, but I should be able to get location data, and maybe even play back phone calls, or fragments of them. I’m putting the raw data together into something like a timeline, maybe it’ll be enough to jog some memories to fill in the gaps between what’s on here.”

“Do you need to be hooked up the whole time for that?” asked Clockblocker. “Because there’s a conference room on this floor with a projector you could connect to, so we don’t have to all huddle around a tiny screen.” _And we wouldn’t have to share the information with these random PRT tech guys_ , went unsaid.

“Sounds good. Just… one… moment…. there!” Lisa started pulling out plugs and wires, and turned to Clockblocker, grinning. “Lead the way! Actually, I’ll lead, follow me!”

It took a couple minutes to get Lisa’s phone hooked up to the projector and another couple minutes to make the projector stop flashing the “change filter” message every two seconds, but after that, we were all set.

The projector showed a map of Brockton Bay- a recent satellite image, from the look of it, since it included a lot of the damage Leviathan had caused- with two blinking red dots, one over Lisa’s base and one over mine.

“Um,” I realized, “should Clockblocker be here for this?”

He let out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “This involves me as much as it does you guys. No way I’m leaving.”

Before I could argue the point, the audio kicked in. It sounded like the conversation was being had on speakerphone, but maybe that was just because Lisa’s phone wasn’t hooked into any audio equipment so it was using its own speakers.

“Hey Taylor, are you at the house?”

“No, I- I mean, I’m at home, but… what is it? Do you need something?”

I remembered this part. Lisa has confused me, because the code we’d worked out was that “home” meant my lair, but “the house” was my old house, where Dad still lived. I guess she’d thought that I might have been spending my birthday with my Dad, which… suddenly I was wishing Lisa still had that bottle of alcohol.

“You can skip forward,” I said. “I remember this, up until you showed up. With drinks.”

“What was in that stuff, anyway?” Aisha asked.

Lisa shrugged as she dragged her finger around on her phone and one of the red dots on the map flickered in an erratic series of hops toward the other, stationary dot. “I had a few bottles of stuff, mixed them together. My power said it would be pretty strong, but nothing dangerous.”

“Nothing dangerous.” I’d been expecting to have to try and keep the anger out of my voice, but the words came out dangerously flat, all on their own.

The scene on the projector changed from a map to a picture that had obviously been taken from a phone. It was sideways, rotated 90 degrees.

The picture was me, sitting in my comfortable chair, holding up my arms as if to ward off the flash of the camera. I wasn’t wearing my mask, but I was still in the rest of my costume. I didn’t remember this picture getting taken, and a glance at Lisa told me that she didn’t remember either.

“Okay, so you started an impromptu photoshoot or something. I guess I could see that? Normal sleepover stuff.”

“You guys have sleepovers?” Clockblocker asked. Aisha sniggered.

The next item was a video, in the same aspect ratio and orientation, still of me. Very shaky, but mostly centered on me.

“-lim” the end of a sentence cut in.

The past-me in the video responded to whatever had been cut off, “Okay. Okay.” She was taking deep breaths, looking into the camera and then turning away. “Okay, okay.”

The camera zoomed in- way in at first, so my eye took up the whole frame, and then just as quickly zoomed back out so it was just my face in the still-wobbling frame. “Brian. I know we never really settled down and talked about-“

“ _Okay!_ Let’smoveonnow, nextonepleaseLisapleasenowgo,” I half-shouted over the audio, while Lisa hastily swiped forward a couple times, spraying flecks of water from her still-damp hand. I didn’t remember whatever _that_ was, and I didn’t really want to either.

Next up was… a sandwich. The kind of thing you’d see in Scooby Doo, just ingredients piled on top of each other until it was so tall it was basically useless as a sandwich.

“There’s no way I’m gonna be able to eat that.” _No shit, past-me._

Instead of a picture or video, the next thing we saw was a text conversation. It looked like an accelerated version of a “live” recording, where each message popped up seconds after the previous one, when the attached timestamps suggested minutes passing between them.

LTT:

buggys bday, need help 2 set hr up at dark meat bufft if u mnow what i mean

AI:

sure, bring pizza and booze.

LTT:

ridger didger will b therw sson

AI:

haha girl are you already wasted?

LTT:

;)

AI:

haha fuck yes

Aisha’s chuckles drew my attention from the projector screen and my own warming face. “Wait, Aisha, if you texted with Lisa before we showed up at your place, why didn’t you tell us about all this before?”

She leaned back dangerously far in her chair and looked up at me. “I got, like, a couple almost unreadable texts from the braniac over here, and then it’s all the same for me as it was for all of you. I do remember the texts though, thought you guys were coming over from, uh, Taylor’s place, but you didn’t show for, like, hours. Nothing to tell.”

“Shuuuushshushush”, that sounded like Lisa, coming from her phone. The projector showed two numbers- one Lisa’s and the other labeled as “unlisted”, with a timer ticking up. Beneath was the map of Brockton Bay, with one red dot a few blocks from my base.

“Nah, I got- lis, lisa, Listen. We- It’s like, okay, so you know-“ that was me again, and it reminded me of old vhs tapes Mom and Dad had made of me as a baby, where I just babbled nonsense for five minutes straight. “It’s, like, it’s oddie, right, and we’re… there’s a giant and-“

A voice, male, came through faintly. He was at a distance from the phone, I was guessing. “Are you okay? Do you know where you’re going?”

“No, ‘is, is like a riddle, and we have the, the, the fluffy…-“ what the hell was I talking about? “we- it- he-“

Past-Lisa tried to say something, but past-me interrupted her, “You’re a Cyglops!”

“Um,” the male voice- Clockblocker?- got out before the phone call cut out with an automated message about not being able to reach the number as dialed. Had Lisa butt-dialed a random number? That seemed… oddly normal.

The words from the call stirred something loose in my head, and I massaged my still-aching skull while I tried willing it into focus. “Oh,” I said quietly as the memory clicked into place. “The hole in Clockblocker’s helmet, right. Cyclops.”

“How does that make sense?” Alec asked.

“Ask me again when I’m drunk,” I muttered. I was just kidding. I was never getting drunk again.

The room was filled with a loud static from Lisa’s phone that drew my attention back to the projector, where past-me was standing in the middle of some rubble somewhere downtown, still recorded sideways. The scene was harshly lit, but without any one source of light I could see- it was like it was day, but above the buildings in the distance I could see the stars.

“Lisa, whas’ my line again?” past-me slurred. She put her arm up, shading her eyes. “Sunny, could you move tha’ back a bit please-thanks.”

Past-Lisa’s voice came from behind the phone camera, “you don’t have lines, Tay, you’re talkin’ from the heart!”

“Then why’d you say ‘Action!’ like-“

Past-me was cut off by the sound of a crumbling building- why did I have to lead the kind of life where I knew what that sounded like?- and the phone camera went wild, moving so much everything was a blur.

“Was that…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Yeah,” Lisa said quietly, hand resting on her belly.

I could just see past-me’s legs. It looked like she was knelt over past-Lisa, and I heard sobbing.

“Fuck. Okay, move on. What’s next?”

Past-me again. “He’s got, like, muscles, you know?”

“Yeah, Tay, I know.”

“No, but, like…” what was past-me doing? She had swarms of bugs- bugs I sorely missed at the moment- working together to lift lengths of metal and pieces of glass and concrete into some kind of construction in front of her.

“He got me, um, it was… like, a dinosaur, but, like, a bug? Y’know? And it was nice. He was-nice. So I wanna do, like, it’s like that, you know?”

Clockblocker tapped his fingers on the table, a slow drum. “Wait, I remember now! That statue we passed on the way here, I knew it was familiar! I remember you made it, and then decided it wasn’t “complementary” enough, so you-“

“Okay, we all remember now, mystery solved, let’s move on,” I said, despite not having a single goddamn memory of this.

“Wait,” Aisha said, “you made a statue of Brian? What did you do after that?”

Lisa saved me by fast-forwarding and interrupting with past-Lisa, on a call with someone without an ID.

“Okay, so you know how you build, like, sniper posts and stuff?”

A gruff male voice answered her, “yeah?”

“Okay, I need you to do that out in that lake thingie, downtown? Get, like, a hundred- no, three hundred- woods, we got those stacks of construction stuff you can grab them from, and then go out there and build a thing out there, like… like so hit’s igh up, yeah?”

“You want me… to build a platform, out in that muck lake that Leviathan made?”

“I’m fukkin paying you to, yeah.”

“All right.” The call ended.

“Do you remember what that was about?” Clockblocker asked Lisa, who shook her head.

“I do,” I said. “That’s where I woke up this morning. This explains _how_ it was made, but _why_ did you do it?”

“Something to do with… giving you guys a good place to be in private? I think?”

The red dot was wandering further north on the map, closer to Regent’s base. The map was replaced by a scrolling slideshow of pictures- not things that Lisa had taken, they were probably downloaded from the internet. Each one was a butterfly: spotted ones with big ‘eyes’ on their wings, blue and white ones, red and orange, all kinds. There was something familiar about them, and not just the fact that they were bugs, kind of my thing.

It was a blurry memory, almost like a dream just a few moments after waking up, but it became _more_ clear, not less. Lisa and I had curled up on one of Alec’s couches with Aisha looking over our shoulders from behind the couch, while she scrolled though pictures on her phone and saved the ones I liked. I rubbed the back of my neck, beneath my hair. Aisha leaned back again and caught my eye, and at least she had the grace to look guilty.

The staticky sound of low-quality audio heralded a new video. I was sitting, cross-legged, hands resting on my legs in some kind of yoga pose. Greace, the pig, was behind me, and I seemed to be using her like a pillow. “Oooohhhhhhmmmmmmm,” past-me intoned.

“Okay, camera’s on,” past-Lisa sniggered, “e’splain again, why you’re doing this.”

Past-me scoffed, without opening her eyes. “My power dunn’ work righ’ now. An’ I don’t wan’ my firs’ time to be crawlin’ with greeby-gralies. So I’m taking to my pagsenger. Passgener. Paggleser.”

“My passenger,” I whispered. At the others’ looks, I clarified, “that’s what Bonesaw called it, the… whatever it is that gives us powers. Riding along in our heads. A passenger.”

“Hummmm. Oooooohhhmmmm. I think I feel something.” The camera shook as past-Lisa presumably laughed at past-me.

And then the video flashed with golden light and Lisa’s phone- the one here, in the present- exploded.

It took several minutes to put out the small fire, make excuses to the techies for the noise, and _then_ make excuses to Miss Militia about the fire. When we were done, Clockblocker said, hesitantly, “I think I’m starting to remember something. Coming here to get the bug containment units shipped out. I think… you guys said it was because of Scion, but I didn’t believe you at the time. Or, I did, and…” He shook his head. “It’s all still so fuzzy.”

“Wait,” Aisha said. “So, she got her bugs tucked away, and they did build whatever the fuck that one call was about… so did you and Brian do it?” She pointed a lazy finger at me.

“I…” Did we? I searched my memory, but there was so little to hold on to. Wait… Greace Lightning had been with us the whole time. Even at the end, she must have, since I’d woken up with her.

“We were drunk.” I realized.

“No shit.” Was that Aisha, Alec, or Lisa? Maybe all of them at once?

“No, I mean… I’d realized that, I think. I remember, sort of, explaining that. You’re not supposed to have sex drunk, you’re not completely in control of yourself. So we went to bed instead, but I thought it would be weird to lie in bed together naked if we weren’t hav- having sex, so I used the top bunk, and he slept on the lower bunk.”

“You had a bunk bed out there on the lake?” Clockblocker asked.

“No,” I smeared my hands over my face, “but I think that’s what I thought the platform was at the time.”

There was a knock on the door, and the fat techie guy swung it open. “Hey,” he said, “The Big M wants whichever one of you is Taylor Hebert to get her ass downstairs, pronto.”

I stiffened, but the others stood up behind me. It was nice to know that they had my back.

“We’ll all go,” Lisa said.

“Uhhh,” the techie looked around the room. “As long as one of you is Hebert, fine. I don’t care.”

We made our way to the ground floor, full of people just milling around, and where I was surprised by a leaping tackle from a small girl. I looked down at her, arms still wrapped around my waist.

“Dinah?” I could hardly believe it.

“Scion said you told him to come help me! And after he blew Coil up, he used his power and got rid of the-“ Her smile faltered for a second, “I don’t even want candy any more, after you did that thing with the pig and spit on my hair! It’s so wonderful!”

I… was this real? I didn’t feel disconnected from my body, but I did feel disconnected from reality. Scion… he’d come to me, and then I’d apparently told him to rescue Dinah from Coil, but _why_? He didn’t talk with _anyone_.

Dinah led me by the hand outside, where-

Half the streets were still ruined, how did they get a goddamn parade float to the PRT building?

“Come on!” Dinah led me to the front of the float, and then up onto it, where she sat next to me. My mind felt fuzzy again- this time it wasn’t from the alcohol, but just how quickly everything was happening. The float started moving forward, and I looked around helplessly. Cheering people surrounded the float, the sounds of their voices all mixing together. I looked back helplessly to the entrance of the PRT building, where the others were just coming out. Aisha waved, and then my view was blocked by the float and the surging crowd.

Wait, so Clockblocker, the pig, Lisa… that explained most of it, but where was Brian?

\- - -

The sun was rising, and he was still stuck. Water in every direction, and filthy water at that. He had only the wooden structure that he’d woken up under as shelter- well, that and the three sets of clothes that he’d been covered in when he woke up almost at noon yesterday.

He stared out over the waters, eyes watching the city beyond, unfocused.

When a flash of movement caught his eye, he pounced his attention on it like a starving cat. It was paper, by the way it caught the wind- rare that something like that blows out over the water without falling in, getting drenched.

He continued to watch as it got closer, closer. Tantalizing. He climbed out to the edge of the half-sunken roof that made up his whole world these last two days and reached out his arm, ready to catch it. It nearly slipped out of his grasp, but he stretched and snatched the paper out of the air. Even if it was just a piece of blank paper, it was _something_ new.

It was a sheet from a newspaper, dated today. The headline said, in big bold print, “Scion Found Dead in Miami”. He flipped it over, trying to find out more, but he only saw a back-page spread of what looked like a parade, and… a girl who looked like Taylor, at the head. Beneath it was the line “Tinkertech pig gives girl healing powers!?”

What _happened_ that night?


End file.
